My work applies a folkloric and historicist lens to medieval and early modern British literature and forward into popular culture.
My interests are in how the narratives of the folk are both read in and repressed by mainstream accounts.

Mascot for #DevilDiss

Mascot for #DevilDiss

Saturday, May 20, 2017

The Devil is in the Details- The Devil's Rhetorical Purpose

I was having a hard time writing the conclusion to my dissertation on the English devil until I read a couple of articles from the Public Medievalist on Race, Racism, and the Middle Ages. It made me realize that we still demonize others and in the world of Brexit and Trump, there are nationalistic tones to this. We demonize Others as a way of defining ourselves- we are THIS because we're not THAT.

That's my dissertation.

And the conclusion was easy to write from there.

Yesterday I had this conversation on Twitter:

Just as demonizing enemies to define your own national identity is not new, neither is invoking the devil in politics. In the mid 1600s, as Cromwell and the Republicans demonized Charles and the Royalist, they did the devil to do it. While it would initially appear that the devil disappears in literature during the English Civil War until the Restoration, he really just moves into politics.

The devil, and his image, are used as a rhetorical shorthand. If the English devil is invoked on the title page of a pamphlet along with Cromwel and the idea of witchcraft, that's a complete story right there.

The audience doesn't need more explanation. By associating Cromwell with witchcraft and the devil, he is demonized, set apart from good Englishmen and women. A threat to not just the souls of the people, but the nation.

The same occurs when the devil is associated with parliament, as happened in 1648. Parliament was not just constructed as demonic because it historically is, but also because it worked counter to the interests of true Englishmen.

If we look at the number of pamphlets published during a section of the early modern period, and then look at the number of pamphlets that invoke the devil, some interesting patterns emerge.

Year and Number of Pamphlets Published
According to EEBO and Stationers' Register (created from my own research)

Recycled
texts and images present new perspectives on current events while invoking
previous arguments. “Just as the pamphlets celebrating the Restoration had
whitewashed the complexities of the preceding years, so the pamphlets around
the year 1680 reinvented the previous two decades” (Raymond 355). In order to
understand these recycled images then we need to understand the current and
past uses. Statistics illustrate that moments of anxiety and tension produce
more texts. There are also similarities in the types of events that produce
spikes in production. These similarities also contribute to the reasons
pamphlets were recycled; if a pamphlet dealt with the same issues and had already
proven its popularity then it was economically beneficial to just recycle the
imagery and argument of past pamphlets. The “Revolution of 1688-9 provided an
ideologically febrile moment for recycling and appropriation” (Raymond 367).
The recycling of certain texts also highlights what images and topics spoke to
the common people, capturing their imagination and representing their feelings.

Pamphlets
didn’t just reflect issues of the time they influenced people and events.
“Pamphlets played their part in the return of monarchy to Britain in 1660”
because “it was pamphlets that tuned and untuned the affections of the people”
(Raymond 323). After the Restoration England saw another milestone for change
in English print culture, with a widening divide between publishers who dealt
with the “scholarly and elite end of the market” versus those who “dealt in
topic and occasional works including pamphlets and newspapers” (Raymond 327).
The Restoration saw the reopening of theatres in 1660, and a revival in
literature production. In 1667 the publication of Paradise Lost, and the Second Dutch War, revisited issues and
concerns from the English Civil War. The years between this and the end of the
Restoration with James II in 1688 means that these echoes from the English
Civil War, with similar fears, anxieties and desires, resulted in recycled
pamphlets. Once again the pamphlet becomes the genre of the people, as the need
for a public voice arises. Out
of the two hundred and fifteen pamphlets that met my criteria of invoking the
devil’s name in the title we can identify several subtopics: religion,
including sermons; politics; ballads, many of which contain images; the supernatural,
including witches; and specific figures; in particular Robert the Devil. There
is also a small set of wills and testaments published in pamphlet format.”
While spellings differ, he is most often named as some variation of “devil”
with some pairings with Sathan, Lucifer, Plato, and serpents.

Distribution of Pamphlet Topics (created from my
own research)

Religious
pamphlets invoked the name of the devil to demonize roundheads, the Pope, Roman
Catholics in general, as well as Jews although not as often as we’d think given
their long-standing connection to the English folkloric devil. Anti-Catholic
rhetorics built on narratives after the Reformation that demonized Catholicism
and criticized popishness, which also connects to the criticisms of ritual seen
in the witchcraft and supernatural themed pamphlets. By far the largest group
of pamphlets were ones that specifically demonized Quakers and Ranters. In both
religious and political pamphlets, the devil is mentioned along with Sin,
Error, and the World, the Flesh and the Devil. Given the tensions of the English
Civil War it’s not surprising that the devil is often associated with
Parliament, Cavaliers, named as a traitor, and associated with the concepts of
war and rebellion. The devil’s identification with discourse and dialogue in
pamphlet titles references the devil’s ability to convince and tempt as well as
his ties to written argument and print culture all of which are key elements of
the figure.Out of these records, eleven
were plays, such as The White Devil, The
Devil is an Asse, or The Merry Devil
of Edmonton.

There
are several gaps in topics covered by these pamphlets including how witches are
dealt with, pamphlets about New World colonies, and connections between the
resurgences of plague, the Great Fire and the devil. While forty-two pamphlets
deal with witches and the supernatural the rhetoric is not what we see in other
texts that deal with witches and witchcraft (For more on this see Michael Bailey’s Battling Demons : Witchcraft, Heresy, and Reform in
the Late Middle Ages (2003)or J.A
Sharpe’s Witchcraft
in early modern England(2001). The visual rhetoric of
racialized and sexualized difference that we associate with witchcraft is
absent. The women are presented as Othered by their association with the devil
but the misogyny is missing as is any mention of pacts as a form of gaining
power. Familiars rarely appear and there are few mentions of the devil and exorcism.
There was also less use of the actual image of the devil than I expected with
only thirteen pamphlets featuring cover art.

From
left to right, top to bottom: Cover art for News from Scotland (1592),
The English Usurer (1634), News
from Hell (1642), A Delicate,
Damnable Dialogue (1642), Plutoes
Remembrance (1642),and The Snare of the Devil (1658)

By
the early modern period the characterization of the English folkloric devil has
coalesced. Physically he was shown as dark, usually black in color, with animal
qualities such as fur, horns, ears, claws, and a tail. He is sometimes shown
with batwings. Part
of the reason why invoking the devil’s name and image works rhetorically is
because the English people knew what he looked like and how he acted.
Publishers depended on known iconography to make cover art work towards
commercial interests, “Visual representation of their pamphleteering activities
accompanied this self-conscious use of the printed medium” (Raymond 228). There
are several recurring iconographies that are connected to the English folkloric
devil tradition; Jews, Catholics, specifically Jesuits (as seen in Gyles Gdhed’s The
pycture of the Devell and the pope (1562) and Roger Mitchell’s The Celestiall Publican the Vitious Courtier
The Jesuite and the Divelle (1630)), the hellmouth, dogs, and
witches all appear on cover art. Pamphlet imagery of the devil uses
recognizable variations of the English folkloric devil. Four out of the eleven
images feature a dark colored devil while the rest show a similar physical
shape only not filled in which could have been a result of the practical
consideration of wanting a clear image for printing production.

The devil works rhetorically because we know what he is. We know how he functions. He leads people astray, he tempts them, he lies, he deceives. Therefore people who are associated with him also have these traits. So far, the devil, and demonizing others, has mostly been used by those in power- Donald Trump, the Brexit arguments. Yet, the tide is starting to turn it seems. News outlets are still spewing the hate started by these campaigns, demonizing Others- refugees, Muslims, women. But a quick search for the devil in recent headlines shows that more and more Trump is the devil.

Given the history of the devil's rhetoric, the brand of the devil is a hard one to overcome. One can only hope that as Trump is constructed as a devil, the people stand on the side of righteousness.

Flynn, Dennis O., and Arturo Giraldez. “Globalization Began in 1571.” Globalization and Global History. Ed. Barry Gillis and William R. Thompson. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Gilman, Ernest B. Plague Writing in Early Modern England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

---. Plague Writing in Early Modern England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Open WorldCat. Web. 30 June 2015.

Halasz, Alexandra. The Marketplace of Print Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England. New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Open WorldCat. Web. 24 May 2015.

Harms, Roeland, Joad Raymond, and Jeroen Salman. Not Dead Things: The Dissemination of Popular Print in England and Wales, Italy, and the Low Countries, 1500-1820. N.p., 2013. Open WorldCat. Web. 30 June 2015.

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About Me

I am a PhD candidate in British and Irish Literary Studies
at the University of New Mexico. My research focuses on how folkloric
characters are represented in literature and popular culture,
specifically the devil.

I regularly write reviews and articles for Sequart Organization. My most recent scholarly work analyzes the function of the folkloric forest in Twin Peaks for an In Focus section of Cinema Journal (2016), the functional aesthetic of the Nightmare on Elm Street films in Style and Formin the Hollywood SlasherFilm (2015), and the creation of Elfego Baca as a folk hero in "Don't Just Print the Legend, Write It: The Odd Construction of Elf ego Baca as Folk Hero" for Western Folklore (2015).

Dissertation Project

The popular understanding of the devil is of a visually different Other who deceives, tempts, and seduces good men and women away from God’s divine authority. He is often portrayed as an adversary and individuals or groups associated with him, such as Jews, Moors, and unruly women, are marginalized and marked as a threat. Yet a longue duree analysis of the English devil from the Anglo-Normans to the Restoration reveals an innately political devil who threatens power structures and defines English nationalism through negation. William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum describes devilish leaders as the greatest threats to England’s stability, who must be defeated by great leaders. Þe Deulis Parlement constructs the democratic collective of Parliament and free speech as demonic. Both I Henry IV and Macbeth demonstrate the dangers of devilish leaders who rebel, challenging the divine authority of the monarchy. Each of these elements; devilish leaders, demonic parliament, and diabolic rebellion are presentand revised in Paradise Lost where Satan is the vehicle for this concerns about English nationalism after the Restoration.